Seeing as there's a lot of similar questions being asked, I figured it was time to combine what I've learned from here over the past months. This guide has taken a lot of information from this sub, so thank you all for contributing! :)

Pokémon Sleep beginners guide

So you just started Pokémon Sleep but you're overwhelmed by everything and don't know where to start? I suggest you start by readin this guide. It's by no means complete, but it will get you started in a general direction. It's not aimed at completely min/maxing the game, but provides guidance to those like me who started out completely lost. I'll cover some basics of the game, some easily overlooked things and the core is what to catch and how to rate them.

Safekeeping:

First things first! Write down your support ID on the main loading screen with snorlax (tap to reveal) or link your account to a google account (Settings > Link Accounts) so you don’t lose it. You need this if you change phones, don't think you'll do it someday later and lose your progress, just do it now, copy/paste it in a word/docs/notepad document and save it on your computer/phone/whatever.

Make friends:

The game has a friend system but it is a little too well hidden. It’s Settings > research community. Use the pinned friend code megathead on the r/PokemonSleep sub and add as many people as you can get. The main benefit of the friend system is that you get 1-2 candies per day per friend! The highlighted photo of your sleep will decide what candy you send so choose wisely!

A little help from Raenonx: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fwhat-are-considered-good-candies-v0-ybqo4w0egiae1.png%3Fwidth%3D1555%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db947582b68aacb70e3ab8216b9c52caebb6548df Generally, the highest tiers are the best candies to send. It's not a problem if you can't send great stuff every day, but do try to send something useful if you can!

While being friends you get levelup benefits too, but don’t unfriend them at lv5. During the legendary beast events we got extra bonus manes (currency for items) from friends, the higher the friendship level the better. And the candies from lv5 are more often to be double, so keep your friends!

It's common etiquette to keep them around, if they are inactive for 7 days, you can assume they stopped playing and befriend a new person instead.

Basic tips for sleep tracking

Then onto the main game. You basically sleep and get benefits from the game. Simple, right? Wish it was. There’s a few things you should know. Sleep is tracked from the first time you hit slumbering, until the last time you hit snoozing. If you move around a lot before you fall asleep, or if you have cats walking over your pillow, it could take a long time until you hit slumbering. The easiest fix is to leave your phone or Pokémon Go Plus+ on your nightstand for 10 minutes before you go to bed to ensure you hitting slumbering when you go to sleep. Go brush your teeth, take a pee, and then when you are comfortable in bed bring your device with you under the pillow. When you wake up, reverse the process. Put it on your nightstand again, go brush your teeth, shower, whatever and end the session after 10 minutes. This ensures you get credit for the full sleep night.

If you use a GoPlus+, if you’re a very messy sleeper you could accidentally hit the button and end your sleep session. This is easily countered by putting it in a tin. Lots of peole on the sub recommend an earphone tin.

What to catch?

After you wake up, you’ll be prompted to do sleep research (or when you sync your GoPlus+/smatwatch). This means you will encounter a bunch of Pokémon based on your sleep score and Snorlax strength. Snorlax strength is accumulated during the day by your team by gathering berries, cooking with found ingredients and triggered Main Skills. In the beginning you won’t score much but as your Pokémon get better, you’ll get better at this. But how do you get better Pokémon? You catch them during Sleep research by throwing Biscuits at them. You will constantly run out of biscuits if you keep tossing them at everything, so you will need to learn how to prioritise.

Catching mechanics: You catch Pokémon by throwing biscuits at them. Each Pokémon has a certain number of 'pips' (no clue why we call them that but we do) above its head, indicating the number of biscuits you need to throw to catch it. After 2 biscuits there's a 50% chance a Pokémon feels full. Don't feel FOMO if a Pokémon gets full, it'll appear again next time with the filled pips still filled. So if you throw a biscuit now, filling 1 pip, next time the same species appears with 1 pip filled. If you spawn multiple of the same Pokémon, they share the bar and if one gets full you can still feed the other.

Energy: If you just started, you’ll notice your team runs out of energy during the day, which gets replenished during the night. Energy determines how fast your Pokémon will work, compared to its average helping speed. You want to keep energy up as much as possible during the day. You can help them by getting a Pokémon with a healing skill on your team. Energy for Everyone is the best skill here. Eevee (Sylveon) and Igglybuff are your main targets early on. In the late game, at Lapis Lakeside you can catch Ralts, the best E4E user in the game.

The rest of your team should consist of other useful mons, they are divided in 3 classes. Berries, ingredients and skills. E4E I mentioned earlier is an example of a skill.

The Holiday event of 2024 brought us a new E4E User, Pawmi. Its strength is between Gardevoir and Sylveon, so pretty good! We don't know the rarity yet as of typing this but it sure looks like a Pokémon to look out for on Snowdrop and OGPP!

Island berry preference: Every island has its own Snorlax. On Greengrass the berries are random (save for events). On the other island, there are preferred berries. The berries are tied to Pokémon types, so basically you will want to match your Pokémon types with the island. Here are some example of good Pokémon per island. This list is far from complete and will change when new Pokémon are added, but as you’re starting out it’s a good aim to start collecting Pokémon for Cyan and Taupe. On each island there’s a higher chance of encountering these Pokémon compared to Greengrass, but if you have nothing to start out with, you’re gonna have a hard time. The difficulty scales per island, GG is the easiest, OGPP is the hardest.

Future islands:

Poison: Toxicroak, Arbok, Swalot

Dragon: Dratini (Great ingredient gatherer even if the berry doesn't match!)

Bug: Vikavolt (Mr Coffee man)

What makes a Pokémon good?

And to dive a little deeper into the game. What makes a Pokémon good? Well, it’s a combination of factors. Each Pokémon has its own stats, how good it is in finding items/berries/skill triggers and how fast it is. These stats I’ll ignore, for now, as this is a beginners guide, but more info can be found on Raenonx which I'll explain at the end of this guide.

The basis you should look at are a Pokémon’s nature and subskills. On top right of the Pokémon information screen you see which type the Pokémon is. Berry/ingredient/skills. This means your Pokémon is good at that, and worse at the other two, so you need to focus your subskills and nature on their specialty. There are some exceptions to the rule of course but I’ll ignore them for now. So what are great subskills and natures for the types?

Berry mons:

Nature: Any Speed up nature is good, best is Ingredient down as you will get even more berries that way.

Subskills: Berry finding S (best subskill in the game for them, you want this early at lv 10-25!!), Helping Speed M and S

Ingredient Mons:

Nature: Ingredient finder or speed up are both great

Subskills: Ingredient Finder M and S, Helping Speed M and S, Inventory up L/M/S

Skill Mons:

Nature: Main Skill/Speed+ nature,

Subskills: Skill Trigger M and S, Helping Speed M and S, Skill Level Up M (this saves seeds)

Subskills can be improved with Subskill Seeds. These are rare items, if you go Premium you get one a month in the store to buy and a free one every three months. You can only upgrade unlocked skills, and if the skill you upgrade to is already in the roster, you cannot upgrade it. For example, you unlock Ingredient Finding S at level 10, and Ingredient Finding M at level 75. That means you’re stuck with IFS and a seed cannot be used.

Main Skills can be improved with Main Skill seeds. In general you only want to use these on Skill mons. In the beginning, your E4E healer would be a great recipient, so Sylveon, Wigglytuff or Gardevoir. Once you get a great Psyduck or Mareep, they will be great with skills as well. Keep in mind evolving a Pokémon ups the Main Skill level, so don’t use too many seeds before evolving!

Gold Skills:

You might have noticed that some Pokémon have gold skills and others don't. They look fancy, so they must be fantastic right? Well, it's not that simple. A mon with only gold skills is generally speaking pretty darn terrible. There are some good gold skills and some bad ones. The possible options are:

Great tier: Berry Finding S, Helping Bonus

Meh tier: Dream Shard Bonus, Energy Recovery Bonus, Research Exp Bonus, Sleep Exp Bonus

Good if you're F2P: Skill level Up M

While some can have their niche, Sleep Exp Bonus and Dream shard during certain events, they're generally not what you want on your mons. Helping Bonus provides a 5% speed bonus to the entire team which is great on any mon. You really could use one in your team as it's just boosting everyone instead of one single mon. BFS means the Pokémon finds another extra berry each time it finds one, so for a berry specialist, it means you would find THREE berries every time it finds a berry, making this the ultimate skill you really want on all your Berry mons in the first or 2nd slot. Lv 50 is a hard grind but could be okay if the early skills are Helping Bonus or Speed ups.

Skill level up is considered not useful for Premium players, as they have access to Main Skill Seeds from the premium shop. This is about to change for Free to Play players starting january 1st, 2025 as they can also buy one in the regular shop from then on. But it's still a hard to find item and will probably be expensive, so for free players Skill Level Up M is a pretty decent free boost.

Raenonx

https://pks.raenonx.cc/en/rating This website is used by most people to rate their mons. It’s a bit of a complex tool, but the basics is you put in your mon’s ingredients and subskills and it’ll give you a general percentage how useful it is. There are many ways to make this more complex, but for now focus on the simple part. Click the link, select the Pokémon you're looking for. You can choose to select the fully evolved forme, but as we will be only comparing species, I prefer to just put in the one I catch. So, for instance, let's select Charmander here. You will see this screen.

Screenshot from Raenonx

Now all you need to do is to fill in the circled parts with your Charmander's stats. the rest we ignore for now. The expected strength you want to match on the type of Pokémon, so for an ING mon like Charmander, you want Ingredient strength. It should automatically adjust this for Berry (Total strength) and Skill mons (Expected skill count). Press the Calculate button I accidentally omitted from the bottom of the screenshot, and wait for Raenonx to finish calculating (a bar will be running horizontally showing progress). Now you get the result.

Charmander is pretty good!

First thing to look for is the score on the right, This Charmander is a great Ingredient finder, as 99/100 is amazing! Now it's not perfect, as the ingredient spread is not the best (mono sausage would've been best but eh I'll take it). As long as you compare Pokémon to their own species this way, you can weed out the bad ones easily and pick the one with the higherst PR. You can complicate this infinitely with all the other options on the site, but for now I would just focus on this. If you want to learn the how and the why, you can open up the bars under the graph which will indicate the Charmander setup that would result in a higher score, in my case a Quiet nature would rank higher, as I have a Main Skill Down nature, and Charmanders skill provides ingredient. So if it had Exp down instead of MSD it would be slightly better. But as Charmander isn't a skill mon it won't proc often so it doesn't really matter that much.

If you make an account, you can use Raenonx for much more. In the Pokémon Box you can save your high rating catches, and if you go to Team Analysis you can add the Pokémon from the box (middle button on the team slot) and calculate your average progress you will make with that team. Can be handy when you want to go to a new island but aren't sure you're going to make a decent score yet.

Cooking:

Every week, Snorlax has a favourite type of dish. Curry/Salad/Drinks&desserts. It means you cook these type of dishes for the week to feed both Snorlax and your team, they get a tiny heal from this and Snorlax gets a boost from your cooking power. Cooking is hard in the beginning. You won't be having many good mons, skills, anything. Try just making simple dishes or autocook until you can get some ingredients to cook your own recipes. In order to unlock new ones, you're going to have to add the right amount of ingredients and unlock more rare ingredients like Slowpoketails.

Good starters for Ingredient mons are the Kanto starters, Charmander, Bulbasaur, Squirtle. They are good for farming Sausage/Ginger, Honey and Milk/Cacao, and have the Ingredient Finder S skill as well to find random stuff. This skill is very useful in getting ingredients you don't have on your team right now as it randomly selects a number of ingredients from your unlocked list. Vaporeon is the best Pokémon with this skill as it's a Skill specialist! If you get a good Eevee, it can be worth considering building a good Vaporeon before you go for Sylveon if you already have a good Igglybuff. The way this skill works is that you first unlock the ingredient, for example you use Drifloon for a day that has corn in its first slot, wait until it finds one and once you collect it, it's in the unlocked list. Then swap it out for Vaporeon and Vaporeon can find corn too. It's not always very reliable and you never know what you're gonna get, but it is certainly faster than waiting an eternity for Slowpoke to produce some tails!

For the ingredients that make a recipe, I use Serebii: https://www.serebii.net/pokemonsleep/dishes.shtml They got all combinations covered and will update when a balancing update is made like recently with soybeans. If you want to unlock a new recipe, you must manually add all the ingredients, and be careful not to fill up your pot with other ingredients that would make a known dish. Don't worry about this the first few weeks, just focus on getting by. Once you get some stronger Ingredient mons, you can start focussing on unlocking certain dishes.

Island progress and when to move:

So now we know what to catch and how to rate our catches, how to make a team for the first island based on the weekly random berries. But when do we move from GG to Cyan, to Taupe and the other islands? Well, I wouldn't go straight after unlocking one. Each island is progressively harder than the previous so it will be hard to get a good Snorlax score right away. You want that, as you want to maximise your nightly spawns as fast as possible! And those depend on the Snorlax score. In general I tend to move islands when I am sure I can at least reach M3 on the previous island, and I have at least 1-2 good enough Pokémon for the new island. Ideally would be to already have a Berry Finding S berry mon matching the new island, but that would require a LOT of luck. It's usually easier to actually find them on the island itself than on Green Grass due to the more focussed spawns. But if you can't put a dent in the score and get 5 spawns a night, it would still be better to go to Greengrass until you can get a better score. Having a good healer and Vaporeon can be key here.

The island bonus is a big help here too, and you can manipulate that a little.

Island Bonus

The map shows you that each island has a bonus when you tap on them. The bonus goes up with 5% after every week of snoozy studies. This used to go up until 60%, but with the release of the Power Plant island it's now 65% if you have 340 sleep styles or 75% if you have 390 sleep styles (or more). This affects island power and skills, so it's good to get it higher for the harder islands before you go there. Good news, yes you don't have to go there to get the % up! an Overflow bonus has also been added. If you reach your maximum on GG, the 5% end of week bonus will overflow to the rest, so 1% Cyan, 1% Taupe, 1% Snowdrop, 1% lapis, 1% OGPP. If you maxed Cyan, that 1% will move, so it's usually best to start maxing out the first two-three islands and with overflow bonus you can tackle Snowdrop, Lapis and the Plant! For reference, I started 8 months ago and I haven't even set foot on Snowdrop yet. This game is a really slow marathon, not a sprint.

Here's an overview of the area bonuses related to the sleep styles unlocked. In the beginning it'll be quite fast but it'll slow down when you've seen the most common styles already. If it goes too slow for you, you could move to a new island but be warned that the climb is steep.

Miscelleaneous:

Basically that’s it. Here’s some miscellaneous things about the game that get asked a lot too.

Shiny snorlax: Yes, Snorlax can be shiny, or have a unique island colour for the week. This is purely visual, just luck and does nothing else but look fancy. He’ll be normal again next week, or not if you’re lucky.

Shiny Pokémon: Regular Pokémon can also be shiny. They will ALWAYS be hungry and ALWAYS caught on the first Poké biscuit! So don't throw a master biscuit at them! Just a regular Poké biscuit is enough!

Items: Focus all your diamonds on expanding your ingredient bag for now, you’ll want that once you get good Pokémon to unlock recipes. Expand the regular bag for a bit too. Don’t use too many items in the beginning. You can buy a Master Biscuit in the shop, it’s useful to have one for Legendaries, but they’re very expensive. Keep an EZZticket in your bag at all time, it’s only 100 Sleep points and can get you a reroll every week when you move islands. This is useful on GG to reroll the random berries, or when you want certain dish types. You can just tap the island again to move back to it. No need to spend two tickets!

Changing types on evolution: Be warned! Some Pokémon change type upon evolution! If you want to use them on an island matching a berry, keep this in mind. Notable examples are: Tyranitar (Rock to Dark) and the Paldean starters. The first stages are elemental (Fire/Water/Grass) while the third stages all get their secondary types (Ghost, fighting, dark). This can be used to use them for different islands though!

There’s all other kinds of deep dives possible, like ingredient spread and such and how to cook the most optimal dishes, but that’s not really for beginners (heck after 7 months I’m not even at that point). For now this is about all I could think of to add. Hope it helps!

Some useful comparative charts:

Which Pokémon for which Ingredients: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcan-someone-share-the-best-ingredient-setup-graphic-v0-n3kah9bkmi4e1.png%3Fwidth%3D3720%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Ddaf7eff81c9a82d3f7e33ea05c50d293917ad234 

Simplified version of above link, which ingredient mon for what ingredient. Bold indicates rare mons for use in the late game.

Best berry finders:

Best berry mons per island, bold indicates best choice for the island

- Edit 04-11: Added island Bonus -

- Edit 05-11: Added cooking -

- Edit 13-11: Added Raenonx part, general formatting, added section on the islands, moved island bonus there-

- Edit 02-12: Added table with Area bonus values-

-Edit 13-12: Added piece on Gold skills-

- Edit 16-12: Elaborated the energy part a little more, added small notes on Raenonx team analysis-

-Edit 25-12: Added holiday event mons-

-Edit 27-12: Added Ing/berry charts-

-Edit 29-12: Added tables for simplifying ING/Berry mons and elaborated catching mechanics-

-Edit 02-01: Added image from Raenonx for what candy to send friends-